Hacking Maps: Who Are the Neighbors Voting For?

06/17/2005

Editor's note: Michael Frumin presents this hack on Fundrace--born out of other hacks--that he contributed to the recently released Mapping Hacks. Michael has prepared a talk on Fundrace, called "Visualizing Democracy," which he'll present at O'Reilly's Where 2.0 Conference, June 29-30, in San Francisco.

Fundrace can show you which political
candidates and parties have the most support in your area—and
which of your neighbors are supporting them.

The
financial machinations of presidential election campaigns are not as
distant, highbrow, or incomprehensible as one might think, and the
website http://www.fundrace.org/ will show you why.
Enter your address and ZIP Code into its Neighbor Search, as shown in
Figure 2-8, and you are immediately provided with a
vista of the political landscape of your neighborhood. By aggregating
and geocoding campaign contribution records, Fundrace allows you to
uncover a little more about the pocket depth and political sentiment
of your friends, coworkers, relatives, and neighbors.

Figure 2-8. A Fundrace Neighbor Search

Fundrace is the result of questions asked and hacks committed by
researchers working at
Eyebeam (http://eyebeam.org/), a nonprofit,
nonpartisan arts and technology organization in New York City.
Fundrace is built on a database of presidential campaign finance
records published by the United States
Federal Election Commission (FEC). These records include the amount
and date of each contribution totaling over $200, along with the
name, mailing address, occupation, and employer of the corresponding
contributor. With individual contributions to campaigns capped at
$2,000, and campaigns raising tens of millions of dollars at a
stroke, this amounts to a fair heap of information for anyone to try
to interpret meaningfully.

In the autumn of 2003, the financing of the presidential primary
campaigns, especially those using grassroots fundraising over the
Web, was a prevalent topic in the national media. The content and
presentation style of other existing campaign finance websites,
such as http://www.opensecrets.org/
and http://www.fecinfo.com/, did not seem likely
to attract the attention of anyone who wasn't
actively seeking out this information already. The first iteration of
Fundrace consisted of a number of simple statistical rankings and a
handful of national fundraising maps, intended to help people draw
some distinctions among the wide field of candidates running at the
time.

Despite offering a modicum of satire, Fundrace 1.0
didn't reach much further than other sites of a
similar nature. By far, the most popular feature of the initial
experiment was the national red-versus-blue Money Map (Figure 2-9), in which each county was shaded either red
or blue, depending on whether Republicans or Democrats had raised
more money there, respectively.

Figure 2-9. A Money Map of the United States, Democrats versus Republicans, by county

Figure 2-10. A Fundrace map of Manhattan

The next step in the right direction came when a Bostonian monthly
magazine of some repute asked to publish one of
Fundrace's maps. They liked the national
red-versus-blue but were also interested in something a little more
localized. Finally, it became time to geocode the data. After
cleaning up the messier street addresses [Hack #81], Fundrace used MapPoint to
plot contributions onto what is probably the most recognized
several-miles-square chunk of land on Earth: Manhattan. Aggregating
by individual building, as shown in Figure 2-10,
while maintaining the red-versus-blue coloring convention, produced
an immediately intuitive and stark picture of sociopolitical
geography.

What quickly became clear upon making this map of New York was that
this data could serve as a lens not only for viewing the different
candidates but for looking at the world in general. It also became
clear that the principle of locality was as applicable as ever.
People are most interested in the data that is physically nearest to
them. Thus was born the Fundrace Neighbor Search. With
contributors' addresses already geocoded, it was a
simple matter of geocoding the query address and sorting by Euclidean
distance to find the user's closest contributing
neighbors.

As they say, the rest is history. The idea, and its results, were so
compelling that within only a couple of days of launching the
Neighbor Search and city-level Money Maps, Fundrace.org was an
extremely hot website. Web logs couldn't link fast
enough, the site was receiving an onslaught of traffic, and the
national media was knocking down our door. From all channels, the
feedback Fundrace received covered a broad range of opinions. We
received many emails thanking us for the valuable public service
performed by the site. We also received numerous requests, none
honored, to remove records from our database.

Some people were shocked to discover the political leanings of their
friends or relatives. Others were embarrassed to know that their
whole office could see whose campaign they had contributed to. The
occasional amateur watchdog contacted Fundrace about perceived
violations of campaign finance law, and a number of academics,
hackers, and GIS professionals requested a copy of our database for
their own exploration.

Probably the most contentious aspect of Fundrace was the fact that it
revealed the home addresses of contributors. Many considered this a
serious threat to personal privacy, but there already existed a
number of websites (including the FEC's) where the
same information, as part of the public record, could be obtained.
Fundrace is of the opinion that the more people who become aware of
the public nature of this information, the better. At the very least,
if a large enough constituency of voters were to decide that the
risks outweigh the benefits, the FEC's policy could
be changed.

In the United States of America there exists a tradition of public
access to certain kinds of government records. This access is rooted
in the principle of government accountability, a necessary feature of
any legitimate democracy. The tradition has, of late, been reinforced
by so-called Freedom of
Information Legislation (FOIL), and by the ease of disseminating such
information via the Internet. Despite this trend, the average citizen
still seems largely unable make good use of FOIL and the Internet to
understand and participate in his own government. Officially
published data and documents are often disorganized, poorly
documented, or simply too voluminous to handle with limited skills
and resources. Fortunately, this leaves plenty of room for hackers
like us, and organizations such as Eyebeam, to do lots of interesting
and relevant work.

Fundrace is a proof positive example that abstruse government data
can excite and engage people, and that all it takes is a few good
hacks.